Who are we?

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk

Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-mathematical-modelling-infectious-diseases

epiforecasts group

Forecasts can be evaluated/scored

Ebola in West Africa, 2013-16

“We were losing ourselves in details […] all we needed to know is, are the number of cases rising, falling, or levelling off?”

– Hans Rosling, Liberia, 2014

Forecasting Ebola

https://ntncmch.github.io/ebola/

Ebola: how wrong were our models?

Funk et al., PLOS Comp Biol, 2019

COVID-19

30 January,2020

Funk et al., 2020

2 March, 2020

Abbott et al., 2020

August 2020

https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/global/

Challenges

• Difficult to communicate limitations

Difficult to communicate limitations

Challenges

• Difficult to communicate limitations
• Difficult to assess impact

Difficult to assess impact

“The Rt estimates generated by the EpiForecasts team were used extensively by the WHO COVID-19 Analytics unit. They formed a core part of two routine analysis pipelines […] regularly presented to the incident management structure at WHO headquarters, including senior management, as well as regional and national WHO offices.”

Challenges

• Difficult to communicate limitations
• Difficult to assess impact
• Initial unavailability of relevant tools

Abbott & Funk, epiforecasts.io, 2022

Tools